The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to an apparatus and method for applying individual user-generated deployment events to a grouping of bookmarked deployable Web portlets.
A Web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, Web portals may offer other services, such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information gathering, and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.
Portlets are pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page. Typically, following the desktop metaphor, a portal page is displayed as a collection of non-overlapping portlet windows, where each portlet window displays a portlet. Hence, a portlet (or collection of portlets) resembles a web-based application that is hosted in a portal. Some examples of portlet applications are email, weather reports, discussion forums, and news.
An archive file is a file that is composed of one or more files along with metadata that can include source volume and medium information, file directory structure, error detection and recovery information, and file comments. An archive file usually employs some form of lossless compression. Archive files may also be encrypted in part or as a whole. Archive files may also be used to collect multiple data files together into a single file for easier portability and storage.
An Enterprise ARchive, or EAR, is a file format used by Java™ platform, Enterprise Edition for packaging one or more modules into a single archive so that the deployment of the various modules onto an application server happens simultaneously and coherently (Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both). An EAR also contains extensible markup language (XML) files, called deployment descriptors, which describe how to deploy the modules. A Web archive file, or portlet, is deployed by creating an instance of the Web archive file at the server within a Web portal such that a client application, i.e. a Web browser, may receive a presentable instance of the Web portal including the portlet.
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of Web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to Web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information, such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags may be chosen informally and personally by the item's creator and/or by its viewer, depending on the system.
Many social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks. Many social bookmarking services provide Web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.